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Ultimate Gilmore Girls Fanaticism
from the Ultimate GG Fans

I’ve been fighting the Lorelai Effect, not in love, but in business. The Lorelai Effect happens when you go after your dream. Everything is going swimmingly, until you start getting serious. Then you find a way to sabotage it. It’s what Lorelai does when she starts to step outside her comfort zone. And it’s an impulse I’ve needed to fight—and I keep needing to fight against.

Lorelai met Max, and she really liked him, and Max was really nice, and he loved her. Max even had a healthy, supportive relationship with his own parents. I bring that up, because it means he would probably also have a healthy, supporting long-term relationship with her and Rory. She had all but bagged herself the perfect husband. And right at the cusp of marriage, she broke it off. It didn’t feel right to her. To this day, I maintain it didn’t feel right, because Max was just too normal.

She does this in business, too. She had been dreaming of owning her own inn since she started working at the Independence Inn all those years ago. (Or maybe even before then. We don’t know for sure.) And so she and Sookie were finally ready to move forward. Everything was perfect. (Oh crap. Not that!) And she told Mia of their plans, and Mia supported her and told her that other people had been wanting to buy the Independence Inn. But Mia hadn’t sold it, because Lorelai was there. And that was the last straw. Lorelai freaked out, put the brakes on the Dragonfly, even yelled at Sookie.

It took the Independence Inn burning down to push Lorelai to start the Dragonfly. But once she did, she had no choice but to make it work. And she did make it work. When Lorelai’s back is against the wall, she always finds a way to succeed. (Hey! Maybe that’s another reason she’ll make it work with Luke.) But as long as what she’s always done continues to make ends meet, she fears taking the risk of making things even better. And the better it promises to be, the more she fears it.

I think there’s a little of the Lorelai Effect an all of us. There’s at least some of it in me. As you know, I’ve been working on starting a new business, as a web consultant. That means I have to do things I’ve never done before. While I’m building this business, I’ve also been doing hourly contract work to buy shoes for my daughters. This is a very common way people use to bootstrap their new businesses. Even Sookie and Lorelai did it, with their little catering business. And Michel, too, was working full-time while the Dragonfly was starting up, because Lorelai and Sookie couldn’t afford to pay him anything at that point. That’s the way it is when you bootstrap your own business.

And in a way, having that source of income is a curse. One of my favorite scenes in season 4 is near the end of “The Incredible Shrinking Lorelais,” when everything is falling apart for Lorelai, and she feels so overwhelmed, and she goes to Luke to ask him for a loan to help with the Dragonfly, and she ends up crying on his shoulder. And yet it was actually good that she didn’t have any other source of income. It was good that Sookie couldn’t do any catering because of her pregnancy. It was good that Lorelai was reaching the end of her rope. Because if she weren’t, she would have found a way to sabotage the Dragonfly. But because her back was up against the wall, she found a way to make it work.

Unfortunately, my back is not up against the wall. I know I can work hourly to make money. And so when it comes time to push forward to success, I can always find a reason to sabotage it. For example:

• I’ve been working on a free online ebook about building a small-business website. This explains my philosophy of web design and attracts new clients. Even after I was done, I was afraid to click the “enable” button so that anyone could read it. There was nothing left on my list of things to do on it. And I had other work I needed to get to. But I felt as though I should wait for my close friends and colleagues to give me feedback on it before I published it. Of course, I have asked friends for feedback. At the same time, I knew I needed to publish the first edition for the world to read, because it’s better to succeed with something imperfect, than to stall until you fail. I knew all this. And still, I had to force myself—literally, force myself—to ignore the terror I felt in my gut, and to do the right thing.
• Whenever I meet someone who could really use what I have to offer, I know I need to contact him to talk about how I can help him. And at this stage in starting a new consultancy, any contact like this is a good one, even if it doesn’t turn into paying work. Because I learn so much about what others are thinking and what problems they’re facing, just by talking to them. And this is something I really need to know in order to succeed. But I’m just “too busy.” Or there’s always something that I feel I need to do first before I can start talking to prospective clients. I need to force myself to make the time, because this is the most important thing I can be doing.
• I once even had a client, and all I needed to do was to complete my quote and send it to him. I was afraid to do it. Silly, yes. But I wrote the quote, and I sent it to him, and I got the job.

What about you? Have you ever had to fight the Lorelai Effect?

-TimK